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Self-learning performance management solutions like Integrien and Netuitive are going to be absolutely an essential part of the migration to dynamic data centers and IT as a Service. Once these dynamic data centers scale out to the thousands of applications in a typical enterprise, and scale up to address the most performance critical applications, the rate of change in the environment will be too high for legacy tools and manual administration to be able to keep. up. These automated self-learning approaches will be the only way in which IT Operations will be able to stay on top of these new environments while staying within staffing and budget constraints.

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VMware has said that is it committed to its Desktop Virtualization Strategy but VMWare’s commitment to VDI as the only solution is going to mean that unless you are only going to deploy VDI you’ll likely consider another vendor to help you achieve your goal. There are two desires which are fundamentally in conflict, and addressing this conflict is the biggest opportunity in desktop computing. Can you manage the demand for users to have effective IT at their fingertips while controlling access and costs from the centre?

What seemed like forever to get here was over in a blink of an eye. VMworld 2010 in San Francisco was once again an incredible event with over 17,000 people in attendance. Now that I have had a little time to reflect on the past week, I wanted to share my thoughts on the week and the event itself. The weather in San Francisco was unseasonable warm for San Francisco standards during the event but as a person from Florida who enjoys warmer weather the temperature for me was absolutely wonderful. I arrived in town on Sunday afternoon and enjoyed taking advantage of the power of twitter from the San Francisco Airport. Once I landed I sent a tweet out to see who else may have landed and who might want to share a cab to the hotel. Denis Guyadeen (@dguyadeen) responded right back and once we grabbed are luggage we were off and on our way.

Virtualization Security was one of the BIG Deals at VMworld with several announcements:

* VMware vShield Edge, App, and End Point * Trend Micro will have the first product making use of vShield End Point * Cisco Virtual Security Gateway (VSG) * HyTrust and their growing list of technology partners

But the biggest news is that Virtualization Security is finally on the radar of most if not all C-level as it is now seen as the gate to entering the cloud. But before we can solve the cloud security issue we have to solve the virtualization security issues. VMware’s announcement has the most impact on the virtualization security ecosystem. At once they are competing head-to-head with some vendors while providing a platform to use for other vendors.

While VMware has articulated the need for a management strategy and has provided some building blocks for its management stack, there are currently and will be for the near term future significant gaps in the VMware management offerings even when the domain of the problem is constrained to the management of the VMware platform. Once the domain is expanded to include the physical infrastructure which underlies the virtualization platform, and once it is again expanded to include multiple virtualization platforms the use case is outside of what VMware intends to provide. For these reasons, third party solutions should be considered for each component of the diagram above when evaluating solutions from VMware.

I wonder how many of us remember when VMware bought BlueLane and their technology, good things were promised, we saw the first part with the release of vSphere when they introduced vShield Zones. This was a “Free” product for those of you that had any version above Advanced vSphere and to be fair for a 1.0 release was a nice weapon to have in your armoury when dealing with the Security during a design and implementation phase.

At VMworld 2010 San Francisco VMware announced and released the expanded and improved vShield family of products. it however now a costed product, now the good news is that vShield Zones been not been removed from the vSphere suite, and are still “Free” the the correctly licensed level of vSphere.

Looking in from 5000 miles (no I didn’t make it to VMworld this year), the two most significant announcements involved the consolidation of VMware’s bulging product lines into clearly-defined vFabric and vCloud strategies, which are respectively PaaS and IaaS plays that compete feature-wise with the established market leaders.

Nearly everyone I talked to at VMworld was buzzing in some form about Virtualization Security. Everyone has picked up on the pre-show buzz from VMware, Trend Micro, HyTrust, and every other security vendor. This week will tell. There are announcements about security, keynote sessions that include security, and more than a few sessions about security.

This is also arguably the first VMworld where there are a large number of Virtualization Security sessions and panels at VMworld that are not entirely from VMware. I find involving the industry as they have at this specific conference moves forward the entire virtualization security ecosystem.

Yesterday at VMworld 2010, VMware, the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, introduced its cloud application platform strategy and solutions, a new focus upon end user computing as a service, a new cloud management solution, new security solutions, and the acquisitons of Integrien and TriCipher.